Aspects of the present invention relate to mobile communication and electronic commerce using a mobile communication device.
Widespread availability and popularity of mobile devices have made them indispensible in both business and everyday use. These mobile devices include portable computing devices such as laptops, netbooks and tablets that provide mobile computing power as well as access to the information on the Internet, text messaging, email and other functions. Other mobile devices such as wireless phone devices not only provide the aforementioned portable computing functions but further include wireless voice capabilities along with applications using features such as built-in cameras, global positioning satellite (GPS) services and others.
The functionality of these mobile devices has converged on a similar set of features in a variety of different form factors. For example, wireless phone devices classified as smartphones tend to have powerful processors and multitasking operating systems previously available only on portable or desktop computing devices. These smartphone devices generally fit in a pocket or purse and have a virtual touchscreen keyboard or miniature “thumb” keyboard for easy entry of data. In comparison, portable computers not only offer general purpose computing power but also operate more like a phone device delivering phone calls and voice capabilities with protocols/services such as voice-over-IP (VOIP) and Skype (Skype is a registered trademark in the United States and other countries of Skype Technologies S.A.).
Despite these advances, mobile devices still have difficulty communicating directly with each other or, for that matter, desktop computers or workstations. When people wish to exchange information, they still generally send an email or text message with their mobile device to the mobile device of the person they are trying to reach. Likewise, mobile devices attempting communication with a desktop computer have little choice but to send the user of the desktop computer a brief email or text message as well. Unfortunately, manually entering information needed for emails or text messages is time consuming, prone to error and often dissuades people from interacting altogether.
Indeed, attempts to establish direct communication between mobile devices has been met with failure for a variety of reason. In many cases, too few devices have the specialized hardware required for communication. For example, infrared transceivers are not found on all mobile devices or computers and therefore lack the scale required to permit reliable communication. Moreover, infrared communication is not only slow but requires a line-of-sight between the transceivers of the devices to operate.
Bluetooth communication is another interesting wireless protocol shared by many mobile devices but it takes too long to sync or “pair” before any communication can take place. The time delay for pairing not only frustrates users but also makes the data transmitted more susceptible to interception. Accordingly, Bluetooth communication may be seen as a security risk and not suited for transmitting sensitive information.
Yet another approach for mobile communication involves displaying and reading bar codes from the display of a mobile device. The bar codes can generally be displayed on a mobile device and then read by another device or computer having a camera or bar code scanner. However, processing bar codes in this manner can be difficult as each display device may need to be configured with different display parameters, aspect ratios, display resolutions and other factors to ensure the bar codes can be read reliably.
Another approach places RFID tags on a mobile device to facilitate quick identification of the phone and promote mobile communication. Indeed, RFID works quickly to identify the mobile device but requires each vendor to purchase a potentially expensive specialized reader device. Given the added expense of the reader and the complexity of accepting payments in this manner, RFID tags and readers have not been widely adopted.